The present invention pertains to a holder for use in packaging glass bottles and, more particularly, to a packaging system using identical thermoformed flexible plastic holders to support the bottles within an enclosing carton to space and cushion the bottles from all carton walls.
The prior art is replete with holders and spacers for multi-bottle packages which are intended to hold an array of bottles in a uniformly spaced arrangement inside an enclosing container, such as a corrugated paperboard carton or the like. The prior use of paperboard separators and fillers has largely been replaced with the use of molded plastic separating and holding devices. U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,982,785 and 3,294,270 are representative of packaging systems utilizing paperboard or paper-like bottle holders and separators for use inside an enclosing carton. U.S. Pat. No. 4,911,300 shows a more recent use of bottle holders and separators constructed of plastic. In particular, this patent shows the use of separate thermoformed trays, each of which is specifically constructed to accommodate either the lower base portions of the bottles or the tops of the bottle necks, but not both. A problem common to all of the foregoing bottle packaging systems is that one or both of the upper and lower ends of the bottles lie in direct contact with an upper or lower carton wall or are separated therefrom only by a layer of material from which the bottle holder is formed. Thus, there is no real cushioning of the bottles so as to protect the glass from breakage as a result of a direct impact on the carton wall against which an end of the bottle is in contact. U.S. Pat. No. 4,093,068 shows a packaging system for cylindrical cans which uses sheets of plastic bubble material to separate and cushion the can ends from the upper and lower walls of the enclosing carton.